Stable Orbit
by Asphodelium
Summary: She is a satellite. She used to be a satellite for someone else, too, until he was violently taken from her. This is the story of how Star fell to pieces and Paulina put her back together, and how even the most shallow satellite can have hidden depths.


**Author's Note:** I have no explanation for this story. It just came to me when I was sitting around channel surfing. I know it's odd, and I don't have a lot of writing experience, so it may be very flawed. But it simply would not leave my mind. I absolutely had to write it out. Whether this gives Star more depth or just turns her into an OC stand in, you'll have to decide for yourself. All I know is this is a story I wanted to tell.

Suggestions, criticisms, ideas, thoughts and feedback of any kind are welcome and appreciated. A writer can only become better if told where they need to improve, after all. Thank you in advance for reading this; sorry about it being rather lengthy.

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><p>Brown eyes were the rarest color on Earth.<p>

She'd seen purples of all kinds, the rich royal purples, the stunning violets, the palest lavenders, the cool toned wisterias, the bright heliotrope of girls like Sam Manson. She'd seen aqua, of course; persian greens and muted cyans and Robin's egg blues, turquoises bright and shining. Greens, greens were everywhere, from the dark spring green of her English teacher to the jungle green eyes Tucker sported, different from her own electric mint eyes. Dash's eyes were glacuous, while Danny's were bright, clear Brandeis blue that she could always spot in a crowd despite her concentrated effort not to notice. Nobody at school had brown eyes. Only celebrities and actors from far flung corners of the Earth had those. They were freaky and gross.

Her father, when he had been alive, had brown eyes.

Star stared around the room full of paints and sighed. This room was technically the attic, and technically she wasn't allowed up here. But it had been her father's art studio, and he had meticulously labelled things. Tubes of paint were in one drawer, more expensive pallettes of watercolors stored in the drawer abover that, and the lowest level harbored face paints and fabric paint, unorthodox materials. Half a wall was nothing but drawers and shelves. She came up here to explore and never ceased to find new things. Sticks of cheap make up sold after Halloween for half price, markers, Sharpies, bottles of tightly sealed ink, clay, nail polish, ash, incense, charcoal. Star spent lonely Sundays here.

Her mother was a church goer, but the kind that had no use for her personality-less daughter. She had brunches to organize, activities to head, mini-speeches to read to the congregation, always headed off to help at worship practice or work with the pastor on some outreach program. Star was, when not given someone to follow, devoid of anything. Since she was in such a state, church overwhelmed her. While her mother knew everyone's name and shook their hands and talked about the latest book or recording or message they were all into, her teenage daughter would sit lifeless in her chair, the size of the room overwhelming her.

It was easier to leave her alone. She hung out with Paulina on Saturdays. She came here on Sunday, to try to remember a time before she had been broken.

The ceiling was painted brown. Painted, spray painted, flicked with bright clay red fabric paint, doodled on with wood markers in intricate patterns. And if she laid in the armchair in the middle of the room, she could remember her father's eyes. His hair was as blonde as hers, maybe lighter, depending on when the light caught it, but his eyes were always the stand out feature. Big, soft, eyebrows arched gently, never furrowing his brow or narrowing his eyes in anger. They were warm and the color of chocolate, his favorite food, and they seemed to light up whenever she braved the big scary tall staircase to the attic. The radio he had perched by the window was always on, and he would scoop her up with paint stained hands, hold her to him as she told him about her day.

He had made enough money to buy the house; he had made enough money that he had created a college fund for her that her mother was not allowed to touch. Though her mother had a 'respectable' job as a manager of a bank, he was the one who Star talked about. He had given her name, Star Rain Ashton. Though her mother teased him that at least her last name sounded normal, she'd loved him, and all his eccentric ways. She loved the way he would paint something just for her, stopping in the middle of a commission to so, she loved the time he'd bleached and dyed denim jackets for her in secret, giving her a rainbow of them on her birthday, she loved the way he came up behind her and hugged her, nestling his head into her shoulder. Star's parents were desperately in love.

They were different. Star knew that early on. Her mother had always been involved with the local church, but had to switch when finally the gossip about her husband became too much. There were rumors, all of them untrue; he was far weirder than people speculated. He slept in the closet or under the bed in his own bedroom. He hated eating, even his beloved sweets carefully parcelled out, and yet he hoarded food, filled their cabinets with organic this and natural that, trying to keep his daughter healthy. If anyone grabbed his wrists, he screamed, shrinking back like he'd been set aflame. His brown eyes were often wide and fearful when outside the house, but it didn't stop him from chronically taking things from other people's trash cans, hauling things back in the dead of night for his latest art piece.

He played with her, at least two hours a day. He had told her once his father only saw him to hit him. But he never hit her, never laid an unloving hand on her. He painted her room, each wall a different color, made patterns on each, turned the ceiling navy blue and flecked it with white and gold spots, a thousand stars. He made her dolls from cloth, their intricately painted clothing always representing some nationality. There was a Mongolian couple with long deels and stompy boots, a Serbian folk singer with his colorful vest, a Hindu woman with her gorgeous little dress that had been hard to make on a minature scale. He made her blankets with patterns overlaying patterns.

Hide and seek, tag, word games, I Spy, days spent drawing at the table where he would tell her she had a good eye for color, everything was perfect. Her freaky brown eyed father was made fun of at school, but she loved him so much she punched a boy four years older than her for it. Every day he made her lunch with sandwiches in the shapes of hearts or stars, carved patterns into the peel of her apples, and snuck her a piece of chocolate.

She was ten when he was murdered.

She really didn't remember much between then and when they moved to Amity Park last year. Without her creative muse beside her she had been broken. Without the man who wove flowers into her hair and made crowns out of ribbons she was lost. When she didn't have someone to pour her heart out to it shriveled and died. Or at least, that's what she was told happened by her mother. Her poor mother, whose faith had been tested so harshly by this, by this unspeakable tragedy to a man who truly was her soulmate. But Star knew her mother was only a Christian, not a saint. Sometimes she lied.

All of Star's paintings, drawings and scribbles, her father kept in his filled but organized art room. There was a special wood box for it, slathered with a rainbow of nail polishes until it resembled a blur of colors. And there was a painting she'd done of an angel with orange-red-yellow wings like fire. A protector. A good guy. In the corner she'd scribbled the date. December fourthteen, when she was ten. The day he was murdered.

She'd been in the room when it happened.

She did not remember it. But she had proof. She always colored at the kitchen table. She remembered he died in the kitchen. Her mother hadn't been able to take it, so she remodelled. The sight still reminded her of her dead husband, so they moved. But Star knew she had to have been there. It was a Sunday. She was drawing. They were both in the kitchen. And then... and then... the paper proved it, that was the date. There was a half started drawing of something else where a jagged line skewed across it like she'd been interrupted. There had been a knock on the door and then...

Then nothing.

Then literally nothing. Darkness. Sleep. She was asleep for a very long time. Or it felt like it. Her mother told her she'd talked, interacted with people, went to school, everything. But all those years were lost to Star. She recalled only brown eyes, warm as chocolate. A soft halo of blonde hair so light it was like the inside of lemon peel. Paint stained hands. These things haunted her she slept, so she slept all the time. She got home, did her homework and slept. She didn't want dinner, she wanted to sleep. She didn't want to go to the mall to go shopping or go eat out with her mother or watch cartons. She slept and when she wasn't sleeping she lay as if dead to the world around the house, often under her parent's bed or in a closet, places that still smelled like him. She spoke enough to get by and even that was automatic. Those four years were a blur to her.

Only Paulina had pierced through it. The Latina had declared her too pretty to be unpopular and more or less forced her to be part of her group of friends. She assumed Star's silence meant she was so over this lame scene. And Star had woken up, somehow. She parroted back the views of the popular kids she was now surrounded by. She listened to music they said was cool. She watched shows that everyone had to see, duh. Paulina gave her a direction, goals to work towards. Paulina told her who she could and could not be seen with. The dark haired girl had rules and the rules made the world make sense.

Paulina had an opinion on everything. Everything had a category and a worth and she just _knew_ somehow how to navigate the mass of people that was high school. She told Star what to do and Star learned to talk like her. She learned to talk, period. She hadn't spoken much back home, where she was the crazy daughter of the crazy artist who was murdered by a robber during a break in gone bad. In Amity Park she was the cool best friend of the much cooler Paulina and her mom was crazy rich or something. With her guide showing her where to go to hang out, what stores to buy from, what music was in, Star absorbed a new personality.

The old one had been lost, buried in blood. She thought, as she stared up at the attic of the art room, that she remembered blood. She ought to leave. She'd stolen her mom's car again to drive over to this town, this house. They still owned the house in St. Albans where Star had grown up. It was never sold. It was perfectly in-tact. And after church her mother had to go lunch with people from the church and talk to the pastor about things and go lead a Bible study. She'd be gone all day. Star looked old enough to drive so she just did it, just drove back to the past, to a house where every room was empty except the attic.

Coming back here probably wasn't psychologically healthy, but neither was Star. She couldn't remember exactly how, but she'd shut down. For a week after her father's murder she was catatonic, speaking not a word, moving only when guided, totally gone from the world. Until she moved to Amity she had nightmares. When she didn't have nightmare he was still with her in her dreams, her brown eyed father, the anomaly, the eccentric damaged man who had made their family complete and made her mother smile.

But when she met Paulina, when she began to change, the nightmares stopped. She stopped obssessing over what had happened. To keep up, to be popular in high school, she had to know things. She had to read up on what was fashionable, what the new trends were, learn from her peers what brands were cool and which weren't. She had to learn their stupid-with-two-oo's lingo. She had to do her hair and learn to do make up. For the first time in years she watched TV and actually comprehended it instead of it being white noise in her blank mind.

She had been asleep mentally, destroyed, stumbling hazily through life alone. She had been a dying star, fading, ready to implode. There had been nights where Star had woken up from nightmares and sat on the windowsill of her open window, legs swung outward, perched, thinking about letting herself fall to the ground below. She knew now from Science class that fall wouldn't have killed her, but at the time it had been a quiet contemplation of a tired heart.

Paulina breathed life into her, got her interested in things, introduced her to people. Valerie, Dash, Kwan, they were her friends because Paulina said so. At first. Then one day she tripped and Dash stopped to help her collect her things. One day she sprained her ankle and Kwan, the big lovable doofus, carried her to the nurse's office. Even Valerie, having been evicted from the popular circle, still said hi to her every day as they passed in the halls. Lots of people said hi to her now. She knew they thought she was fake, but she felt real. She felt like she was there. She had been sleeping, dying, a dormant star drifting alone until a bigger one pulled her into its orbit.

Here now in her father's true inner sanctum, she walked to the drawers and opened one up. Every tube of paint was labelled, and there were shades of blue and green that reminded her of the new people in her life. There was a green that made her recall Danny Phantom's eyes, a cool toned black that reminded her of Danny Fenton's hair. And there was something significant there, some connection she was aware of but couldn't make, like trying to recall a dream. Like trying to recall the night of the murder, something was missing and it was all she could do to know it was.

She shut the drawer, however, and retrieved her car keys from the floor where they'd fallen. Star needed to get out of here before she slipped back into that old dark mindset, before she ended up lingering here so long she almost forgot her new self. The self Paulina had sculpted for her had a lot of rules. There was a lot of cruelty to it, a lot of arrogance, a lot of intricacies she hadn't know about at first. It was a flawed self that Paulina had made for her, a snooty, vain one, but it was hers. It was something Star could wrap herself in, wear like a mask.

And she was becoming that mask. Her reactions were starting to feel genuine, her interest in the fashion channel was real, she talked to Kwan on the phone for hours about the latest pop star and that show they both liked. She found herself painting her nails because she wanted to, not because it had been mandated by Paulina. She spent a Thursday afternoon curling her hair one day and watching Mean Girls and her relieved mother said a prayer of thanks to God, that her daughter was finally doing _something_, she was _living_ and not merely existing.

She was not yet totally this new person. She couldn't keep the act up in church, she froze up in the face of their honesty and openness and how everyone seemed to know what to do. She had been terrified of the school dance, and slipped into her old silence, holding her head low. Thankfully Kwan had been there and on some level he understood, not the cause of her hesitance or the depths of the cracks in her persona but that she wasn't having fun. So he had danced with her all night, not giving any other popular girl a second glance, teaching her moves, pulling her out of the black hole she'd come so close to falling into.

As Star drove home, she knew the real reason why her visits to this house continued. Her old self, unbroken, the smiling child playing in daddy's paints, still lived as an invisible ghost within that house. She didn't come here to relive the blood soaked night where the police had found her locked in a closet, her father having thrown her in for her own protection and defended her with his life. She didn't come here to think about her broken hearted mother screaming at the men remodelling the kitchen or the day she'd decided they needed to move. She came here to remember how she had been happy once. How she had been a brightly shining star thrown into the air and caught by her father, how they lived and laughed and loved.

And if that had once been her, then that could be her again. When Paulina invited the girls to hang out and go see a movie, when they went to parties and Star got to meet new people, when Kwan invited her over to play video games, Star was alive. She was not the most popular girl in school, she wasn't the prettiest, she wasn't the smartest, but she was part of life again. Even in some days she slipped back into the void, there were people now to pull her out.

Paulina had saved her life. She was the shade of brown in a world of greens, blues and purples. She was the one who broke down Star's walls with manicured hands and dragged her back into the world of the living. She hadn't meant to do so. It didn't matter. She owed Paulina her life, her interests, her music, her friends, her everything.

She knew that the other kids, the 'unpopular' ones, called her Satellite behind her back. It was true. She had been her father's satellite for so long and so intensely that when he was taken from her she had drifted into and through nothing. And now she was Paulina's satellite. She had been sucked into orbit around Paulina like so many other people, and it was there she truly belonged. She was still a damaged satellite, but each day it was a little easier to face life, and each night it was a little easier to sleep.

Star didn't need to get a life outside Paulina. She had found a life in her, instead.


End file.
